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LXer Weekly Roundup for 10-Jun-2012

All kinds of big news this week for you LXWR readers out there. Linus express his true feelings for the newest Gnome, Red Hat decides to get into bed with Microsoft, Our own Carla Schroder has an opinion on it, Mark Shuttleworth thinks Windows Azure is great..and here I thought I had heard it all. Nope, not even close. Enjoy!

Linux Users Sign a Petition Requesting Only Native Games in Humble Bundles: Humble Indie Bundle 5 was launched recently with five popular and award winning indie games. All these games are supported natively on Linux except one, LIMBO. LIMBO doesn't run natively on Linux and instead uses a Wine/CodeWeavers wrapper. It has been a hot topic for debate in last couple of days and Humble Bundle organizers have commented on this.

Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a "total user experience design failure": When Fedora 17 released GNOME 3.4, I found I could deal with it. I still didn’t like it much, and I prefer both Ubuntu 12.04’s Unity and Linux Mint 13’s Cinnamon interfaces, but if I had to, I could live with the GNOME 3.4 desktop. But for Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, GNOME 3.4 is ”a total UX (user experience design) failure.”

Any gnome3 knowledgeable people out here?: But with F17 comes gnome3. And I knew I'd have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst cr@p could be fixed with extensions, and I'd used 3.4 on my laptop enough to know it should be all somewhat usable. But christ, it's a "one step forward, one step back" kind of thing. Change the font sizes? No can do - until you install the tweak tool, because the standard settings panel still doesn't do something as fundamental as that. Ok, I knew it used to be broken, I knew the work-around, but it's still broken?

Gnome Developers Should Start Listening To Linus Torvalds: When Linus Torvalds sneezes, the Linux world catches the cold. We often find Linus complaining about Gnome, no surprises you will complain about the flaws in the technology you use and not about the one you never touch. But when he says something it carries a lot of weight as he shares his experience as a user and not the father of Linux. His rants are also important as it gives voice to thousands of users who share the same plight but no one listens to their problem. So, what irked Linus this time?

Why I Dislike Ubuntu - Reason #37: I got burned by Ubuntu again this morning - as if I needed to be reminded why I dislike it so much. I have a number of computers around here, and they all have a moderately complicated multi-boot configuration. Each of them has multiple Linux distributions installed, and most of them have some sort of Windows as well. I always use the openSuSE Legacy GRUB bootloader. The overall result is that it does what I want, and it's reliable. At least, it was reliable until I installed some Ubuntu updates this morning.

Old-School Linux Software Updating Techniques: Sure, you can use any of the fancy graphical tools for updating Linux or for adding new programs to the open source OS. But sometimes it's faster and more efficient to use brute force and a command line. For those days, you need to know these shell commands update and add programs to your Linux system. Behold.. the command line!

7 More Heroes of Linux: The Linux world is vast, and extends far beyond Linus. Here is a second batch of talented, creative people doing wonderful things with Linux and FOSS; a followup to Unsung Heroes of Linux, Part One. There are literally thousands of contributors doing excellent work that benefits all of us, and it's high time to start saying, "Thank you."

Red Hat deal with Microsoft is a bad idea: In November 2006, when Novell signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft, the free and open source software community, for the most part, was predictably appalled.

UEFI Secure Boot: The strength of Linux security has long been one of the driving factors in its adoption. Maintaining leadership security capabilities is an ongoing work area that Red Hat is involved in and aimed at increasingly providing defensive capabilities in many dimensions. One security threat that has been getting a lot of interest lately is the ability to ensure the integrity of the early boot sequence - the handoff of control from the lowest level system firmware (traditionally provided by the hardware vendor) through to the operating system kernel. This is important because there have increasingly been real-world exploits where fraudulently modified early boot code has introduced vulnerabilities into the operating system.

Red Hat Drinks the Microsoft Kool-Aid: Fie on ye, Red Hat. It's a sad bad day when you polish the Microsoft road apple. Tim Burke of Red Hat wrote a masterful apologetic for Microsoft's strong-arming and takeover of the most basic operation of a computer-- starting it up. Executive summary: We are in this 100% with our good friends in Redmond.